I have been curious about SSD drives , Hybrid drives, etc…
I can see why it is faster because of it being solid state drive instead of a hardware drive.I do not understand where people say to make them your boot drive when most of the affordable ones you cannot install windows 7 and all your programs onto the one drive. any clarification would be great!
thanks!

[QUOTE=hulltech;2623805]I have been curious about SSD drives , Hybrid drives, etc…
I can see why it is faster because of it being solid state drive instead of a hardware drive.I do not understand where people say to make them your boot drive when most of the affordable ones you cannot install windows 7 and all your programs onto the one drive. any clarification would be great!
thanks![/QUOTE]

From my stand point the load time won’t affect my needs and since they are still out of price rang if you go with equivalent SSD capacity compared to Hard disk. So what you could buy for a 500 hard drive a 500 SSD could be possible 3x the price of a hard drive putting it out of the purchasing of the masses. I will use hard drive for some time until the price and capacity of SSD can what I pay for a equivalent size hard drive. And only til then will I buy a SSD. So they way I see it if you don’t need a SSD don’t purchase it and buy a hard drive instead and save your money upgrade your RAM instead that will give you the most return for your purchase.

[QUOTE=hulltech;2623805]I have been curious about SSD drives , Hybrid drives, etc…
I can see why it is faster because of it being solid state drive instead of a hardware drive.I do not understand where people say to make them your boot drive when most of the affordable ones you cannot install windows 7 and all your programs onto the one drive. any clarification would be great!
thanks![/QUOTE]

Yo hulltech-

ALL my OS drives are SSD drives - three 120-128GB drives and one 96GB drive - all are on Windows 7

I have not encountered any problems with with either the drives nor space on the drives. All but y HP laptop are backed by 500GB caviar black Western Digital drives.

Good to hear but for me I don’t have the kinda money to just buy SSD when a regular hard disk fits my current needs. That where buyers need to access is what they are paying going to make a large return for their investment? What one can buy for 150 is a good size hard drive that is more then 128. But then again spend on that SSD if you want to.

@coolcolors
There is another way to put this.
If you have a fairly modern PC and you are still using an HDD rather than an SSD, then buying an SSD will give you the biggest boost to performance that can be had for the money.
It really is as simple as that. An SSD is like going from a Pentium 4 to a Sandy Bridge 2600K, you get a tangible performance boost. The difference in performance from an HDD to an SSD is huge, as an SSD can access data hundreds of times faster than an HDD, and with a state of the art consumer grade SSD, small file random reads and writes are thousands of times faster on an SSD.

[QUOTE=alan1476;2623916]I am not folding anymore but I think the processor would have more to do with folding than the SSD.[/QUOTE]

Yes but it still has to write back and force after computing, and also upload and download new projects.
The main reason I have not gone with a SSD is I run Folding 24x7 and I really did not want to replace SSD to often.

[QUOTE=bean55;2623918]Yes but it still has to write back and force after computing, and also upload and download new projects.
The main reason I have not gone with a SSD is I run Folding 24x7 and I really did not want to replace SSD to often.[/QUOTE]
Look at the the picture I posted of SSD Life Pro and look at the End of Life Date.

[QUOTE=CDan;2623931]Does that Mushkin drive utility work with other SSDs?[/QUOTE]
Yes. All SSDs. Its not a Mushkin Utility its called SSD Life. Its really only for show CDan , its not that accurate, so don’t get all excited.

[QUOTE=bean55;2623915]Do you think that would reduce the estimated life by a lot ?[/QUOTE]
Not unless the SSD was almost completely full, leaving only a few MB’s spare for work files - resulting in the same part of the SSD being written to over & over.

[QUOTE=bean55;2623915]Yes but it still has to write back and force after computing, and also upload and download new projects.
The main reason I have not gone with a SSD is I run Folding 24x7 and I really did not want to replace SSD to often. [/quote]

I wouldn’t use an SSD as a sole drive, so far I’ve owned 4 SSD’s, and they’ve all failed in less than 6 months, and then the affordable capacity is too low to be used as a sole drive.

For laptops with a single HDD slot, I’d use a hybrid drive instead.

For Desktop machines, I’d use a small capacity SSD with a larger slave HDD.

Anything which will be doing lots of writing to the drive you can install/configure to use the HDD (torrent programs/folding@home).

High end intel motherboards can have large additional SSD caches added to the motherboards which produce SSD-like speeds from normal HDD’s.

That’s the problem now not everyone can spend 300 on a SSD when that money would give a larger HDD and more memory and upgrade in CPU that would be a better investment in my hard earn money. Until one can buy a 240 SSD at a 250 HDD price or 1 TB SSD at 1TB HDD price (all laptop drives that is and after the flooding is over in Thailand when prices goes back to normal for HDD drives) then I will decide at that point but til then I keep my faithful HDD humming just right along.

[QUOTE=coolcolors;2623969]That’s the problem now not everyone can spend 300 on a SSD when that money would give a larger HDD and more memory and upgrade in CPU that would be a better investment in my hard earn money. Until one can buy a 240 SSD at a 250 HDD price or 1 TB SSD at 1TB HDD price (all laptop drives that is and after the flooding is over in Thailand when prices goes back to normal for HDD drives) then I will decide at that point but til then I keep my faithful HDD humming just right along.[/QUOTE]

I do understand your thinking. Until you actually experience an SSD, its just another pricier hard drive. Dee does not exaggerate. The $100.00 spent on a boot/OS/program SSD will in most cases give you a bigger performance boost than spending the same for faster proc/memory. Until you actually experience the boot and program load/performance boost, you just don’t have a clue :).

Hard drive is the last performance bottleneck of the modern computers,for ex. my system scores 7.2 to 7.4 which is the lowest score corresponding to my SSD performance index while CPU/RAM score’s 7.5, GPU 7.8. My older mechanical system drive optimized and maintained was getting 5.5 score at it’s best.
SSD (especially SATA III) shortens dramatically OS boot time (10 seconds for windows 7 using a SATA III 550 MBs read SSD) very valuable for those who need to reboot their system often for hardware or software testing.
In Gaming, game loading times are improved with the use of SSD, and sometimes game reactivity, same goes for applications.
Netbook users and eventually laptop users will appreciate a " NON Vibrant!" operation silent and with less heat production.(Appreciated in desktops too mostly for busy system drives)
SSDs are very stable in my experience with windows7, no errors or crashes in a year of use. although might need some more work in bios and system config.
I am using 3 SSDs : a 32 GB SATA2 200MBs for my netbook, a 60 GB sataIII 554 MBs for my desktop system and a 60 GB Sata2 250 MBs as secondary drive for program files folder for games and heavy applications : total cost = $150, definitely worth it.